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Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Neverending Scene

I've been writing all morning and it's time to take a break. So how do I take a break? I write on the blog. Makes perfect sense to me.

Not really. It's just that I've spent the past couple of days working on a scene that's giving me fits. Before I got to this scene, I looked forward to writing it because it's kinda cute and funny. Once I got to it, it became a different story. Not literally. The scene turned out to be not such a breeze to write as I anticipated. In desperation, I wrote past it. Now, I keep going back and trying to flesh it out and put some closure on it. Almost there, but not quite. For some reason, my hero is behaving badly. He keeps shutting me out and not letting me inside his head. I won't be happy again until that scene is completely finished and I'm satisfied with it. Only then will I be able to move on completely and make some real progress again.

What really bugs me is I'm now behind schedule for my deadline. So when I really get going again, I'll have to push my output each day for a while to make up for lost time. Not fun. But I need to stick to my deadline. A huge part of being a (professional) writer is learning discipline. Authors have to meet deadlines. That's just a fact.

In other news, I entered a contest on a whim a couple of nights ago. I don't expect anything to come of it and doubt if my entry even gets a mention. It's a hook contest, first 100 words of the manuscript, which comes out to about the first two paragraphs. There are a bunch of great entries, none of them mine, which seems rather low-key compared to the others. LOL! But, hey, if you expect any kind of feedback or results, you have to put yourself out there. Everybody's looking for a killer first line. Try coming up with a great, hooky first line sometime. It's not as easy as it seems.

Devon

2 comments:

  1. Gosh Dev! You need a hooky line??? Go to a bar!!! ROFL!!

    Sometimes when you have trouble like, you gotta get up and walk away for awhile. Like you don't already know that. I used to put out our local bird club newsletter. It was about 6 pages long. Sometimes I could really get on a role about something with breeding, care, or something with a parrot. Then other times, I sat and stared at the screen. LOL. Glad I didn't have to have as many words or pages as what you do!!

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  2. Hi Susi! Thanks for the advice. LOL!!! Now if we only had a bar around here. It's dry as a bone here--no booze. Weird, huh?

    I finally conquered that scene today. Now, I'm moving right along again. Yippeee! I don't know why it gave me such a problem. It's a fun little scene--yeah, now that's it written. LOL!

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